How to Predict the Unpredictable: The Art of Outsmarting Almost Everyone by William Poundstone
William Poundstone believes that we are all in the business of predicting, whether it be something as minor as playing rock, paper, scissors to pay a bar bill though to anticipating how the housing or stock markets are going to move. Now, I'm not particularly competitive - if whatever it is means that much to someone else then I'd rather let them have it - so this book didn't appeal to me on the basis of doing better than someone else, but I was interested in how it might be possible to predict what is going to happen. So, care to predict how it stacked up? Full review...
Pocket World in Figures 2015 by The Economist
There are people who don't understand the joy of raw data: no accompanying analysis (or spin) - just a collection of figures relevant to a particular circumstance. If you're one of those people then this book will mean little to you, but if you want a pocket (well, certainly handbag or briefcase) work of reference then this book will be a treasure. I once gave a copy to a diplomat and he kept his wife awake until the early hours as he came across another gem which she had to know without delay. The 2015 edition is the twenty fourth in the series - and diplomatic (and similar) spouses everywhere should prepare themselves for the onslaught. Full review...
Create Your Own Online Store (using WordPress) in a Weekend by Alannah Moore
I've run a website for over eight years now but I've always shied away from any inclusion of e-commerce on the site. It seemed like too large a subject, too much complexity and choice and the possibility of problems which could go disastrously wrong. I first encountered Alannah Moore when I read The Creative Person's Website Builder and was impressed by the way that she approached her subject, so when I had the opportunity to see how to create an online store in a weekend, I jumped at the chance. Full review...
Money: The Unauthorised Biography by Felix Martin
Occasionally books are not exactly what they seem. When I picked this up, read the blurb and began the contents inside, I was expecting a kind of biography or history of money through the ages. The opening chapter, a brief sketch of the economy of the Pacific island of Yap and how it worked, seemed to confirm this. It tells us how in the late nineteenth century Yap, east of the Philippine Islands, had an unwieldy coinage consisting of stone wheels around 12ft in diameter, called fei. The population did not carry these around, let alone own them like we possess pounds and pence, as they were part of a sophisticated system of credit management. Full review...
Consiglieri: Leading from the Shadows by Richard Hytner
I've always been fascinated by the existence of that shadowy figure, the consigliere, in stories about the Mafia. He - and it was always a man - appeared to be full of wisdom, with the interests of the family at heart and without an ambitious bone in his body, or so it would seem. It was the title of Richard Hytner's book which drew me in - along with the idea that coming top is sometimes second best. That seemed to go against everything that I'd ever been brought up to believe. So - does he make a good case for being the second in command? Full review...
The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life by Uri Gneezy and John List
Wow! This is a most surprising economics book.
Behavioral economists (if you’ll excuse the American spelling) investigate people’s buying behaviour and consuming patterns. I guess we know about that already because supermarkets here lull us into buying three for the price of two, to come back next week for £10 off a £100, or to garner extra points on a loyalty card (Oh why can’t they just go for a cheaper price at the point of sale? Why do profits have to be in double percentage point increases year on year?). A fair bit of manipulation to ensure that a company survives is already part and parcel of our lives. If you’d asked me before I read this book, I would have lined up that sort of consumer marketing psychology alongside banking as profiteering. However … these guys are different: they really do seem to care about the plight of the underprivileged, and they come from an academic setting, rather than a commercial one. Full review...
Get Things Done: What Stops Smart People Achieving More and How You Can Change by Robert Kelsey
We're all so busy these days it's easy to veer between headless chicken and cherry picking modes, or at least it is for me. (I really hope my boss isn’t reading this!) In fact procrastination is my super power which was why I grabbed Robert Kelsey's book from the shelf with excited anticipation: in a self-help book with one of the longest titles known to man, he promises to help us become more efficient time managers and to stop putting things off. Full review...
The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort
As if we didn't have enough excuses to appreciate the 'Masters of the Universe' of the financial sector. After the tax dodging, the bonus scamming, price fixing and the valiant attempt to bring down the entire world economy comes Jordan Belfort aka the Wolf of Wall Street. To be fair to Belfort, he plied his trade long before the most recent financial meltdown. Still, he's managed to piggy back the latest crash via a best selling book which has been re-released to coincide with a film adaptation starring Leonardo Dicaprio. Full review...
Live At the Brixton Academy: A riotous life in the music business by Simon Parkes and J S Rafaeli
Who on earth would want to buy and run a live music venue in deepest Brixton, and manage to keep it running for fifteen years, transforming it against all the odds into what becomes one of Britain’s most iconic establishments of its kind? Such an undertaking calls for somebody with special managerial skills who can keep one step ahead of the game, walking a precarious tightrope, keeping gangsters, punters, promoters and the local authorities onside. It also requires a good deal of luck. Full review...
Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
I don't have a problem with making decisions, probably because I've always tended to the view that it's better to make a decision and get on with life than haver and waste time in limbo. With a few notable exceptions it's served me well, but when Decisive appeared on my desk it struck me that there could be advantages to improving the quality of the decisions too. The Heath brothers have a good history of collaborating on such subjects and delivering books which open the mind. Full review...
How to Make a Million Slowly: My Guiding Principles from a Lifetime of Investing by John Lee
You should, of course, remember the old adage. 'If something seems too good to be true, it probably is'. If you find a slim book with the title 'How to Make a Million - Slowly' you shouldn't assume that you're about to have an entirely different relationship with your Bank Manager. On the other hand John Lee - Lord Lee of Trafford - was the UK's first PEP/ISA millionaire, from an investment of £125,000, so there's no need to suspect that you'll open the book to find that you're told to 'do as I do'. This is a man who has done it and has a lot of good advice - after all, he wrote the My Portfolio Column in the Financial Times for fourteen years. Full review...
What if Money Grew on Trees?: Asking the big questions about economics by David Boyle
In a climate of increasing economic uncertainty, we may often find ourselves exploring the big questions about money, finance and the global market. For example, during the recent downturn, experts were faced with such questions as What if we just kept printing more banknotes? and What would happen if the banks crashed again? These, and other thought-provoking speculative questions have been put to a team of experts and their answers have been recorded in a fascinating and absorbing little book called What if Money Grew on Trees? Full review...
Talk Lean: Shorter Meetings. Quicker Results. Better Relations by Alan H Palmer
When I think back to my days as an employee the memory of the meetings makes me shudder. They were usually badly prepared and managed with little aim other than to tick a box so that someone could prove to his manager that he held meetings. The waste of time was on a monumental scale and I doubt that I'm alone in thinking this. Include other meetings which you have on personal matters and you'll probably agree that it's rare to emerge feeling that you've achieved what you wanted to achieve - or that you haven't been manipulated. Alan H Palmer has a plan for making meetings shorter and getting better results, but most importantly (for me) he wants you to be able to do it all openly, with no tricks, no gimmicks and complete honesty. Full review...
The Curve: From Freeloaders into Superfans: The Future of Business by Nicholas Lovell
Back in the 20th century, companies tried to sell the same products to everyone for the same price, and needed to shift massive amounts of them if they wanted to make a lot of money. Today, there is the potential to get just as much money from customers by selling expensive items or services to a small number of big spenders. Of course, the trick is getting enough of these big spenders to discover what you're marketing in the first place - and one of the best ways to do that is by giving something away for free. But how do they then turn these freeloaders into superfans? Author and consultant Nicholas Lovell gives us an overview of the changing world, and advice on how to take advantage of it, in this fascinating book. Full review...
The Year Without Pants: WordPress.Com and the Future of Work by Scott Berkun
Sometimes you find a book which you simply can't not read. 'The Year Without Pants' was one of them. It's not what you're thinking (money's not that tight) - but the story of what happens when an old-school management guru goes back to the coal face to lead a team which had not had a leader before - to be accurate they'd not had teams - in a revolutionary company which takes remote working to the extreme. Members of Scott Berkun's team lived all over the world and worked for a company which had largely gone beyond email, had headquarters which were rarely used and had no rules. So, why did I have to read the book? Well, the company in question is Automattic which brings us WordPress, the open source software which powers fifty million websites. I run a website which uses open-source software - and I've been in business for the last seven and a half years with someone to whom I've never even spoken. Full review...
The Con Men: A History of Financial Fraud and the Lessons You Can Learn by Leo Gough
Most people will recognise the now-infamous Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford as crooks who swindled thousands of investors of their hard-earned savings but at one time these individuals had gained stellar reputations in the financial world. In fact Madoff was a former chairman of NASDAQ (originally the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations - now the second-largest stock market comparing to official stock exchanges by market capitalization in the world) and well respected. He’s currently serving 150 in prison for running a 65 billion dollar Ponzi scheme, whilst Stanford was sentenced to 110 years for the same offence. How did they get away with it? This book will tell you how. Full review...
The Reality Test: Still Relying on Strategy? by Robert Rowland Smith
If you are in business the chances are that you know there are areas in which you need help, or - at the very least - could improve. Sometimes it's quite difficult to quantify where you need the help, but you're probably quite sure about what you don't need and that's best summed up as too much science, jargon you don't understand or anything that you have to wade through to come up with the conclusion that you were doing it roughly right in the first place. A good starting point is a book which you can dip into as you need and which edges your thinking into areas it's not been into for a while. Full review...
Freedom from Bosses Forever by Tony Robinson OBE
When we first meet Canadian businesswoman Leonora Soculitherz (don't struggle - it's pronounced 'so cool it hurts') she's on her way from Manchester Airport to Scarborough, the home of her agent, Tony Robinson OBE. You get the measure of the woman straight away as she lets her irritation show about the problems you find in the First Class carriage on the train. (She is so right - I was once grateful to spend the journey perched on a luggage rack.) Her mission is a piece of investigative journalism that's going to introduce her to some very superior people as she searches for information about why people in small businesses don't get the help they need. Full review...
Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age by George Brock
At about the turn of the century most people on the street where I live had a morning paper delivered and a good number also got an evening paper. The queue at the newsagent in the village would be out of the door each morning as people picked up a paper on their way to work. I can't remember when I last saw a newspaper boy (or girl) on their rounds and we only buy the weekend papers as an indulgence with a more leisurely breakfast. Times have changed - and there's no sign that the situation is likely to settle in the near future. Full review...
The 15 Essential Marketing Masterclasses for Your Small Business by Dee Blick
A problem which will be common to most small businesses is finding the time to market yourself. You're small - you spend your time working to earn the money - that is (after all) why you're in business. You don't have the time to add on something which begins to seem like a whole new business in itself and you're probably not making the money which would allow you to employ someone to do it for you. Besides - where do you start? What's going to be worth your time and money? What should you avoid? How can you find out without wading through lots of theory and science and still be left wondering if this is the road you should be taking? Full review...
Put Your Mindset to Work: The One Asset You Really Need to Win and Keep the Job You Love by James Reed and Paul G Stoltz
It's well over a decade since I was involved in hiring staff for an employer but over the last seven years I've been active in bringing reviewers to Bookbag. Certain reactions stand out from both experiences. The first is that skills rarely matter: if they're important for the job I can usually teach or polish them. In fact well, this is how we did it at... can be a disadvantage not least because the temptation to throttle someone can become quite overwhelming on a bad day. Paper qualifications are not really that important either: for the most part the bare minimum will suffice and I've often found that the more highly-qualified applicants can find it quite difficult to adapt themselves to the job I'm offering. At the other end of the scale I've taken people on and after a while thought that if I had half a dozen people of this calibre I could send the rest home. What marks these people out is their attitude. Nowadays it's called mindset. Full review...
Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson and Bill Breen
There can be few of us whose lives were not untouched at some stage by a phase of building things out of LEGO bricks. They comprised a time-honoured toy for children of all ages which weathered many a storm since Ole Kirk Christiansen, a master carpenter, founded the family-owned company in Billund, Denmark in 1932. However fashions change, and this was never more true than when computer software swept nearly everything before it towards the end of the last century. Brand loyalty and an inability (or refusal) to adapt sufficiently was not enough to protect it from the combined onslaught of video games, MP3 players and other hi-tech delights, or a harsh business climate in a cut-throat market where competition was intense and famous names were rapidly going to the wall. In 2003, three years after two different surveys had called the LEGO brick ‘the toy of the century’, the Group announced the biggest loss in its history and it appeared to be doomed. Full review...
Managing Yourself (The Checklist Series: Step by step guides to getting it right) by The Chartered Management Institute
When you start work, when you become a manager or move up the ladder it's assumed that you will need training in managing. This is always assumed to be managing other people, but it's only very rarely that any consideration is given to managing yourself - and then probably only in specific areas. But - if you haven't sorted yourself out, thought through your own actions and motivations, how can you give leadership to others? Managing Yourself remedies this and covers the cradle to grave of working life. If you have ambitions to move up the career ladder - or even if you just want to have a more rewarding and stress-free working life - this book is essential reading. Full review...
Winning Without Losing: 66 strategies for succeeding in business while living a happy and balanced life by Martin Bjergegaard and Jordan Milne
It's a common assumption that if you're a serious entrepreneur then you're going to have to dedicate your life to making money, passing up on the good things (apart from those which can be bought, obviously) such as a happy family life, the world outside of work and quite probably your health too. But what if there was a way to have it all? Winning Without Losing' doesn't give a blueprint which will enable you to go out and make your first million and have a wonderful life outside work - but it does give you sixty six ideas for ways in which you could adjust your working life to make the most of it without ruining everything else. Full review...
Made to last: The story of Britain's best-known shoe firm by Mark Palmer
From its founding by the Quaker brothers Cyrus and James Clark in the Somerset village of Street, to its present-day status as a global shoe brand, the name of Clark has weathered many a storm as it draws close to its bicentenary. This account of the company, by a distant kinsman of the two original founders, has drawn heavily on the archives and on in-depth interviews with the family to tell the full story. Full review...
Stanley Gibbons Stamp Catalogue 2013: Commonwealth and Empire Stamps 1840 - 1970 by Hugh Jefferies
You might think that as all the stamps in this catalogue have been in existence for at least forty years there can be little more to be said about them but this 115th edition is acknowledged to be the most significant in many years. Most exciting (but probably more so to sellers than buyers) is the fact that in a time of economic downturn there are thousands of price increases and evidence of a very lively market. Demand for good stamps is greater than it has been at any time in the last thirty years according to editor Hugh Jefferies, although he does add that prices are rising faster in some areas than others. It's difficult to see how a serious collector - or seller - can be without an up-to-date copy of the catalogue for this reason alone. Full review...